Tag Archives: The Rainbow Faults

I had beautiful clear-white pages in my diary this week. It has been the first week in ages I’ve not been gallivanting around the place. I spent a large portion of it doing my tax return, or more accurately, filling in my spreadsheet so that I can work out what to put in my tax return. I usually wait till the last possible moment to do my return as I hate doing it so much. However, this year I was motivated by the possibility of getting some money back, now I’m a student. I’ve pretty much finished it, but it took me most of the week, and I’m just letting it all settle before I file it on Monday.

So that hasn’t been much fun – on the other hand, it is heartening to know that I can make a living from poetry and that my freelance income has steadily increased over the last five or so years of working as a poet, without having to go out and look for work. I feel very lucky that my work doesn’t feel like work, and I suppose filling in the tax return does bring that home.

I have managed to fit some PhD reading in though. I’ve worked through three chapters of a book called Reading Poetry: An Introduction by Tom Furniss and Michael Bath.

The first chapter asks the reader to think about different poems about poetry and to articulate the theory of poetry they are promoting. In the chapter Keats ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ and Blake’s ‘The Tyger’ are used as different examples of theories about creativity or poetry. Other poems that I like that they ask you to read are ‘The Author to her Book‘ by Anne Bradstreet and Archibald MacLeish ‘Ars Poetica‘.

It reminded me that when I first wrote my poem ‘The Master Engraver’, Ann Sansom said something about the poem being really about writing poetry. I remember being doubtful at the time – I’d listened to a program about engraver Graham Short on Radio 4 in my car, when one of my schools cancelled the lesson because the children were on a trip. I was sitting in my car, wasting time before driving to my next school and it felt like my heart moved when I heard Graham’s description of his work and when that happens I have to write a poem.

When I wrote the poem I just wanted to write a poem about Graham Short. In this textbook I’ve been reading though, the authors talk quite a bit about the problem of the ‘author’s intention’, that when we read poetry, we assume that the purpose is to discover the poet’s intention when writing it. They talk about T.S Eliot and the New Critics differing approach to this, and quoting from the textbook here they argue that ‘a poem should be read on its own terms rather than in terms of author’s statements about his or her intentions when writing it’.

They then go on to outline four problems with the notion of authorial intention – the problem of access, the possibility that poets might deliberately mislead readers about their intentions or forget what their intentions were, that there may be meanings they did not consciously intend or were aware of, and lastly why the author’s intentions should be privileged over what the text itself says.

I’m quoting or paraphrasing briefly Reading Poetry: An Introduction here. The third problem, that there may be meanings they did not consciously intend or were aware of is the one that interests me at the moment, in relation to my own poem. When I read it back now, it feels like my own theory of poetics or theory of creativity, which I wasn’t aware I was writing.

When Graham Short talked about waiting, of working late at night, of being completely alone, of this complete commitment, of requiring both the body and the mind to be controlled and focused, of it being hard work without it feeling like work, it was something I found deeply moving. I never really thought about why, until now, but Ann’s comment has always sat in the back of my head, waiting to be unpacked and thought about, like all comments from the best of our teachers.

Does it matter that I didn’t write the poem meaning it to be a statement about writing poetry? I don’t think so -I think if I’d set out to write about writing poetry, it probably would have been a terrible poem. My ignorance is probably what saved it!

My one poetry outing this week was to the annual Simon Armitage reading in Grasmere. It was a great atmosphere, I think people were really happy to be at a contemporary poetry reading again at The Wordsworth Trust, and obviously Simon Armitage was brilliant. So brilliant in fact that due to chatting, I got to the book stall too late to buy his latest collection which was annoying. One of my Dove Cottage Young Poets read as well, Heather Hughes and went down really well. She didn’t seem fazed at all by the large audience, and Simon even told her that his favourite line of hers ‘She claims to have slipped’ might end up in a poem of his. Simon was one of my tutors on the MA and this moment of generosity towards a young writer didn’t surprise me, but I did think it was really lovely and I know it meant a lot to Heather.

Today’s Sunday Poem is from a fantastic pamphlet called The Rainbow Faults by Kate Wakeling, which was published in 2016 by The Rialto. Kate kindly sent me a copy of this pamphlet in March. I usually skim-read or speed-read things through once, and then if I like them, I put them to one side to read through at a slower pace, so I have two piles of books – ones to read and then ones to read again, which I acknowledge is a complicated way of running things, but I’m a very impatient reader when I read things first of all, especially if I like them straight away, I want to get to the end so I can read them again at a more leisurely pace. So that is why Kate’s pamphlet has been languishing on my ‘read-again-more-slowly’ pile.

The poem I’ve chosen is ‘Looking Glass’ which just resonated with me straight away. It picks up on a lot of the things I’ve been reading about form and content in this large textbook I’m wading through, and the more I pick at this poem, the more I like it.

First of all, I love the clever use of verbs in this poem. The woman ‘sees’ a skeleton. She ‘sees the beggared skull’. The skeleton ‘watches’ the woman, and ‘watches her glazed cheek.’ I know ‘sees’ and ‘watches’ are very close in meaning, but for me ‘sees’ is much more passive, whereas ‘watching’ implies action, I think it also implies a kind of knowing or judgement. This fits with the next line when the woman ‘startles at her blank-boned future’ but the skeleton ‘Wonders at the fallow of her peachiness’. The skeleton seems detached and in control, the woman is reacting, as if she is one step behind. I suppose this also fits with the idea of the woman looking toward her future (the skeleton) whereas the skeleton is looking back.

The form of this poem fits brilliantly with the content as well. The stanzas are a slanted reflection of each other as well. It’s significant that the poet chose not to put them side by side on the page – they are disjointed. This is a looking glass, but it is not reflecting reality. A woman looks into a mirror and sees a skeleton. A skeleton looks out and watches a woman. Each line also reflects a later line in the poem, the same but different, an example of parallelism, not exact repetition, but repetition with difference.

The last two lines of this first stanza make me think this poem is about anorexia, which fits with the looking glass not reflecting reality – the wanting of ‘this scrubbed fossil self’, and the creepiness of the ‘sticky breath’ of a demon. That disgust in the ‘sticky breath’ also fits with concerns of eating or not eating, as does some of the words used in the second stanza, the ‘fallow of her peachiness’ and her ‘glazed cheek’. There are a few words associated with food here actually.

And the last two lines of the second stanza are just as disturbing. The skeleton is ‘quick with fatigue at the slog of her pulse’ – so being alive is exhausting. The last line I’m still puzzling and turning over in my mind. The implication is that it is the skeleton who ‘looses thrilled surrender across vacant ribs.’ Again this makes me think about eating, or not eating, this emptiness of the ‘vacant ribs’.

If you’ve enjoyed this poem, you can buy a copy of Kate’s poem from The Rialto here

Kate Wakeling grew up in Yorkshire and Birmingham. She studied music at Cambridge University and the School of Oriental and African Studies, and works as an ethnomusicologist at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music & Dance and as writer-in-residence with Aurora Orchestra. Her poetry has appeared in magazines and anthologies including The Rialto, Magma, Oxford Poetry, The Best British Poetry 2014 (Salt) and The Forward Book of Poetry 2016.

Looking Glass – Kate Wakeling

Woman looks at mirror
Sees skeleton
Sees the beggared skull
Startles at her blank-boned future
Is dense with want for this scrubbed fossil self
Feels sticky breath of demon at her elbow

L

))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))Skeleton looks out of mirror)))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))Watches woman))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))Watches her glazed cheek))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))Wonders at the fallow of her peachiness))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))Is quick with fatique at the slog of her pulse))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))Looses thrilled surrender across vacant ribs